While we await the Airgas decision, Steve Pearlstein (who I had the pleasure of meeting once in Saigon) has some thoughts in the Washington Post on the AOL-HuffPost merger. He thinks its the AOL-TimeWarner deal all over again: AOL looking for a route away from dial-up access and into contet. This time, though he thinks it might make more sense. I tend to think that he is right. This deal is more manageable and less grandiose in scale. HuffPost has an active Internet community and content that it can more or less plug right into the AOL suite. That's a far cry from visions on delivering all of Warner's movie catalogue over the Internet to AOL subs. But ... wait a minute ... isn't that basically happening now - 12 years later? Maybe it was too much to soon the first time around and this time will be better. Time will tell. At least Arianna got cash.